Revolution And Its Discontents

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Ten years ago, Dr. Angelo Codevilla wrote America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. His best-seller analysis of our country’s bipartisan elites quickly formed the foundation for the fledgling Tea Party and, later, for the unprecedented coalition that elected Donald Trump in 2016.
The Ruling Class has never accepted Trump’s victory. It was — and is — illegitimate, they insist. To employ Thomas Sowell’s term, they view themselves to be “anointed” as our natural betters to tell us how to live our lives. For them, those millions of us whom Hillary Clinton labeled as “Deplorables” belong in the class described by Aristotle as “natural slaves.” Our lives will be better if we are ruled by those naturally superior to us than if we lived according to our own lights.
Deplorables disagree. We “believe that the system is rigged,” Codevilla wrote. We want to “drain the swamp.”
Of course, the elites fought back. Their power, wealth, and status were on the line. The “revolution” Codevilla predicted in the 2010 title was coming to pass. By 2017, he described the conflict as a “Cold Civil War.”
“Well-nigh the entire ruling class — government bureaucracies, the judiciary, academia, media, associated client groups, Democratic officials, and Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — have joined in ‘Resistance’ to the 2016 elections,” he wrote. For a time, they embraced “politics as war,” using every power, legitimate and otherwise, to resist. By 2019, however, he saw violence as inevitable. “At a certain point, the other side shoots back,” he wrote — and that was before the riots that still ravage America’s urban areas.
With the prospect of revolution so close at hand, we turn to Edmund Burke. Russell Kirk calls Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France “one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.” And there are ominous parallels with our own time — too many, alas. Consider: Burke visited France three times, Kirk writes, “returning to London dismayed at the rise of atheism among the French.”
If Burke visited the United States today, would he be dismayed to see our Ruling Class’ repudiation of The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God? Is the rise of atheism nothing short of a pandemic?

The Qualm Before The Storm

Joe Sobran limned that phrase to depict the precarious uncertainty that precedes the inevitable conflict. History doesn’t repeat itself, we are told, but it rhymes. The present moment finds us in the midst of a tsunami of lies, ideology, venom, and hate. Reason, logic, and history itself lie undefended on the precipice of ruin. The preambles of Revolution can span a long period of time, Codevilla observes, and the timeline of our own civilization’s collapse is long indeed. But the moment the “spark” (to use Lenin’s term) ignites, the “shock of events” takes over. That stage of the revolution never takes long.
“The presumption of the ‘Age of Reason’ roused Burke’s indignation and contempt,” Kirk writes.
“Indignation and contempt.” Doesn’t that describe our own response to the elites’ gaggle of grifters and powermongers of our own time?
Kirk continues: “Endowed with the prophet’s vision, [Burke] marvelously foresaw the whole course of events which would follow up on the French attempt to reconstruct society after an abstract pattern.”
Today’s “pattern” is no longer a mere abstraction. It is a cauldron of chaos. Burke’s vibrant vision belongs as much to our own time as to his. “The revolution,” writes Kirk, “after careering fiercely through a series of stages of hysterical violence, would end in a despotism.”
On this point, Codevilla cites Aristotle, who “points out that oligarchies born of violent revolution tend to succumb to the very violence that births them, quickly degenerating into some kind of tyranny or one-man rule.”
And it doesn’t take long. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” observed royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan. Dictators are able to consolidate their power because they first eliminate those who once served as their fawning enablers.
The hangers-on, the sycophants, the slobbering lapdogs who preened for those pirouetting pomposities will no longer be required. In fact, they will now be the competition. Soon they will be sent to the Gulag or to the gallows. Machiavelli proposed that the Prince deal with them all at once, with all of them. Many tyrants since have tipped their bloody hat to the master.
The tyrants will also deal with the Deplorables, of course. Including us Catholics. We all know what happened to the Church and the faithful in revolutionary France, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and China, to name a few. So it’s especially daunting to discover that that the Vatican isn’t leading the resistance. Nor is the USCCB. In fact, they both seem to be cheering the revolution along.

What Is To Be Done?

So we Deplorables are going to be on our own. Branded by our shepherds as “racists,” “bigots,” even “Pharisees,” the faithful too will be sent underground or worse, as our brothers and sisters have been dealt with in Communist China, which seems to be the working model of “Catholic Joe” Biden, with the glowing imprimatur of the Vatican’s scandal-tainted insider Bishop Zanchetta.
But wait — what about reform? Isn’t that what the Jacobins, then and now, promise to deliver? Here Burke delivers a warning that was too late for France but not for us:
“Is it then true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform? So that it was of absolute necessity that the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place?
“All of France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789,” he writes. “The instructions to the representatives to the Estates-General, from every district in that Kingdom, were filled with projects for the reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it.”
No one in early 1789 wanted to destroy the Ancien Régime, he writes. “Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they would never have permitted the most remote approach.”
In this, today’s Jacobins are ahead of the curve. Do they really want only reform? No way. Revolution is in the air — although admittedly, our radical Democrats want only to destroy parts of the Constitution, not all of it.
Historian Carl B. Cone writes that, before the French Revolution, Burke’s view of the French Enlightenment had been theoretical, cautious, and indecisive. But in short order, “the shock of events transformed it. Events clarified his thinking, removed his indecisiveness, and enabled him to make up his mind about the evils and dangers of the revolution.”
Will the “shock of events” transform our own view of today’s Jacobins? Will we reject them with scorn and horror? Because, in Russell Kirk’s words, they want to finish the job of “[bringing] down in ruins most of what was fine and noble in traditional society.”
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, OMI, was hopeful, but he wasn’t an optimist. “I expect to die in bed,” he wrote, “my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as the Church has done so often in human history.”
Holy Martyrs of the Vendée, pray for us!